It never ceases to amaze me how change can just blow in unexpectedly in this all too brief life. I see it so often when people are confronted with big decisions as their life circumstances change – often overnight.
For most of human history, people did not believe that the world changed very much or, for that matter, that change could ever be positive. Stability and cyclicality were the ideals. The same stories were told again and again, time was understood to turn like a wheel rather than move like an arrow, technology hardly advanced, trades were handed down from generation to generation and the social order appeared immutable. In this age, we by contrast, are obsessed with, and laud, change. We are taught to regard widespread and frequent change as inescapable – and a profound advantage. Some feel only pity for yesteryear and measure our virtue by our openness to continuous revolution. To confess to a fear of change is to risk being labelled as that most damned of contemporary figures: a reactionary. Yet our adaptability to change is neither a given, nor always entirely straightforward. The arena in which the advantages of change are at their most evident is science and technology.
The prototype helicopter built by Paul Cornu in 1907 was a hugely gallant contraption of plywood, string and bicycle wheels. But it is, without dispute, much less good at vertical takeoff and hovering than the latest machines from AgustaWestland. The direction of change in technology is clear and the sense of progress obvious. Medicine provides countless instances of the same kind – which seduces us into supposing that change in general must always bring extreme benefits, extending a hopefulness which is entirely justified in specific areas like rotor blades and antibiotics to other areas where its relevance and legitimacy are, in fact, much less secure. For example, politics and society.
We know – from folklore or our own lives – that the old ways were at points not merely anachronistic. They contained important truths and kinds of happiness that have now escaped our grasp. The villages were quieter, the shops more restricted, the manners more sober, but there was an openness to experience, perhaps an awareness, a groundedness and a gratitude that we may long for in the frenzy of the kaleidoscopic present. In order to summon the will to action, to rouse ourselves and our communities from inertia, we have no choice but to tactically overestimate the advantages that accrue from change. We do this around marriage, divorce, moving to a new country, starting a business or shifting the children’s schools. It’s not that there will never be a good result, simply that there will of course be a range of subtle losses too. Not all goods can coexist. The outcome is always more ambivalent than we can quite imagine. Nostalgia is not just for the simple-minded, it’s a natural response to what is lost even with every genuine improvement.
However open to change we might be, it’s in the nature of revolutions that we have a bad habit of missing them. Often, they simply come too fast. For many generations, people in the ancient city of Pompeii lived a prosperous life. The soil was good, the climate was kindly. They built gracious houses. They planted vineyards on the slopes of nearby Mount Vesuvius while all along, the pressure of the magma inside slowly built up. The people gave dinner parties, struggled for status, bought works of art and scanned the horizon for changes, positive and negative. Just no one considered the peak above the city skyline. The story of Pompeii is moving because it is a story of an innocence, in which we know ourselves to be at some level implicated. For us too, something we are blithely ignoring will be the probable cause of our sudden downfall. We are steering blind, pursuing our ordinary business on the natural assumption that whatever feels secure today will be so tomorrow. We too have no real idea where the next explosion may come from. Or else we fail to adapt because change is so slow.
Perhaps sea may be a better metaphor than a volcano. Year on year, the waves gradually eat into the rocks; complete change occurs through minute imperceptible actions. We can’t believe that small lapping motions could win against a huge edifice of rock – but they can. Good theorists of change do not ultimately focus so much on the tempo of change, they identify fundamental features of human nature and wonder how changes will relate to them.
We underestimate opportunities for change in part because our lives are so short. We can generally directly witness only a few revolutions in them. So, we are fooled by impressions of stability – like children who consider their childhood home as an eternal part of the earth. Our congenital error is to imagine that what appears solid must be so. We get used to horse drawn wagons, they have been around since we arrived on the planet, so why would they vanish? We get used to our tidy orchards maturing in the sun on the slopes of a fertile mountain; why would an inferno come here?
The error has long fascinated philosophers. Bertrand Russell imagined a turkey used to being fed by a farmer. Turkeys have, like us, short memories so when it hears the tread of the farmer’s boots, it feels sure that – of course – it is about to be fed, as always. Then it’s the week before Christmas. The turkey is a creature of habit, as are we for much of the time, but we do in theory at least, have reason and therefore a key advantage. A philosophical turkey would have wondered why the farmer was helping him every day and would have speculated on possible reasons so far unknown. The presence of a mysterious factor would have haunted the imagination of the benighted animal. The response to complacency is not so much to be continually on edge as to attempt to think more deeply and more sceptically about the workings of reality. We are undermined, too, by a false sense of hierarchy about what qualifies as trivial and what is important.
We carry around with us implicit and distorted ideas as to what it must be worth paying attention to – and what we can safely ignore. So too we assign meaning to things and events that are perhaps not so. It is in the end very understandable that change should be so frightening or at least sad: we will not be around for most of it. Lingering beneath our occasional lack of adaptability is a dread of the change that will one day wipe us away. It is because we are so exposed to change in ourselves that we seek to make or protect things that will outlast us, businesses included. We have so much to cope with in terms of change in our bodies, no wonder if we often find ourselves deeply interested in things that resist change in the world outside. We define some of the things we most care about when we dare to ask ourselves what we hope will never change. But, how often do we ask ourselves those questions?
And as for assigning meaning where there is none, I think this little poem sums it up perfectly…
I saw a flower.
I thought it was giving.
On closer look,
I saw it was living.
